It seemed clear to us that this is really about focussing on institutional administrative data, as it’s probably harder to sell the idea of providing research data in linked data form to the Pro VC. Linked data probably doesn’t allow you to do things that couldn’t do by other means, but it is easier than other approaches in the long run, once you’ve got your linked data available. Linked Data can be of value without having to be open:

“Southampton’s data is used internally. You could draw a ring around the data and say ‘that’s closed’, and it would still have the same value.”

== Benefits ==

Quantifying the value of linked data efficiencies can be tricky, but providing open data allows quicker development of tools, as the data the tools hook into already exist and are standardised.

== Strategies ==

Don’t mention the term ‘linked data’ to the Pro VC, or get into discussing the technology. It’s about the outcomes and the solutions, not the technologies. Getting ‘Champions’ who have the ear of the Pro VC will help. Some enticing prototype example mash-up demonstrators that help sell the idea are also important. Also, pointing out that other universities are deploying and using linked open data to their advantage may help. Your University will want to be part of the club.

Making it easy for others to supply data that can be utilised as part of linked data efforts is important. This can be via Google spreadsheets, or e-mailing spreadsheets for example. You need to offload the difficult jobs to the people who are motivated and know what they’re doing.

It will also help to sell the idea to other potential consumers, such as the libraries, and other data providers. Possibly sell on the idea of the “increasing prominence of holdings” for libraries. This helps bring attention and re-use.

It’s worth emphasising that linked data simplifies the Freedom of Infomataion (FOI) process. We can say “yes, we’ve already published that FOI data”. You have a responsibility to publish this data if asked via FOI anyway. This is an example of a Sheer curation approach.

Linked data may provide decreased bureaucracy. There’s no need to ask other parts of the University for their data, wasting their time, if it’s already published centrally. Examples here are estates, HR, library, student statistics.

The potential for increased business intelligence is a great sell, and Linked Data can provide the means to do this. Again, you need to sell a solution to a problem, not a technology. The University ‘implementation’ managers need to be involved and brought on board as well as the as the Pro VC.

It can be a problem that some institutions adopt a ‘best of breed’ policy with technology. Linked data doesn’t fit too well with this. However, it’s worth noting that Linked Data doesn’t need to change the user experience.

A lot of the arguments being made here don’t just apply to linked data. Much is about issues such as opening access to data generally. It was noted that there have been many efforts from JISC to solve the institutional data silo problem.

If we were setting a new University up from scratch, going for Linked Data from the start would be a realistic option, but it’s always hard to change currently embedded practice. Universities having Chief Technology Officers would help here, or perhaps a PVC for Technology?

We’re very pleased to announce the release of http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk, the first Linked Data set produced by the LOCAH project. The team has been working hard since the beginning of the project on modelling the complex archival data and transforming it into RDF Linked Data. This is now available in a variety of forms via the data.archiveshub.ac.uk home page. A number of previous blog posts outline the modelling and transformation process, the RDF terms used in the data, and the challenges and opportunities arising along the way. A forthcoming post will provide some example queries for accessing data from the SPARQL query endpoint. The data and content is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 licence.

We’re working on a visualisation prototype that provides an example of how we link the Hub Data with other Linked Data sources on the Web using our enhanced dataset to provide a useful graphical resource for researchers.

One important point to note is that this initial release is a selected subset, representative of the Hub collection descriptions as a proof of concept, and does not contain the full Archives Hub dataset at present, although we are very keen to explore this in the future.

We still have some work to do, this being the initial release of the Hub data. Some revisions for a later release will address a few issues including reconciling our internal person and subject names, and will also contain some further enhancements to the data to include links to Library of Congress subject headings and further links to DBPedia based on subject terms. We also hope to include links for place names using Geonames and Ordnance Survey.

We encourage feedback on the data, the model and any other aspect of data.archiveshub.ac.uk, so please leave comments or contact us directly.

We are also working hard on our other main LOCAH release, the Copac Linked Data. Our first version of the model for this is now finished, and we have the data in our test triple store. We hope to release this in about a month’s time.

I’d personally like to thank the LOCAH team for all their hard work on this exciting and challenging project. I’d also like to thank our technology partner, Talis for kindly providing our Linked Data store.

The International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit (“LOD-LAM”) will convene leaders in their respective areas of expertise from the humanities and sciences to catalyze practical, actionable approaches to publishing Linked Open Data, specifically:

Identify the tools and techniques for publishing and working with Linked Open Data.

Draft precedents and policy for licensing and copyright considerations regarding the publishing of library, archive, and museum metadata.

Publish definitions and promote use cases that will give LAM staff the tools they need to advocate for Linked Open Data in their institutions.

This is the first of a number of posts outlining our project plan in line with the requirements of the call document. So here we are – our aims, objectives and intended final outputs:

The LOCAH project aims to make records from the JISC funded Archives Hub service, and records from the JISC funded Copac service available as Linked Data. In each case, the aim is to provide persistent URIs for the key entities described in that data, dereferencing to documents describing those entities. The information will be made available as web pages in XHTML containing RDFa and also Linked Data RDF/XML. SPARQL endpoints will be provided to enable the data to be queried. In addition, consideration will be given to the provision of a simple query API for some common queries.

Making resources available as structured data

The work will involve:

Analysis & modelling of the current data and the selection (or definition) of appropriate RDF vocabularies.

Development of procedures to transform existing data formats to RDF. Either:

uploading of that transformed data to an RDF store (such as a Talis Platform instance ) and development of application to serve data from that store, or

development of an application to serve RDF data from an existing data store.

The former will be the case for the Hub data; the latter is likely to be used for Copac.

We intend to enhance the source data with links between these two datasets and with existing Linked Data sets made available by other parties (e.g. DBpedia, Geonames, the Virtual International Authority File, Library of Congress’ Subject headings). This process may include simple name lookups and also the use of services such as EDINA Unlock, OpenCalais and Muddy to identify entities from text fragments. Given that Copac is in a transition phase to a new database during the project, we will be taking a more lightweight approach to structuring and enhancing Copac data. We will then be able to make a comparison between the outcomes of a lightweight rapid approach to producing Linked Data for Copac, and the relatively resource intensive data enrichment approach for the Archives Hub.

The project will adopt a lightweight iterative approach to the development and testing of the exposed structured content. This will involve the rapid development of interfaces to Hub and Copac data that will be tested against existing third party Linked Data tools and data sets. The evaluated results will feed into the further phases of development.

The result will be the availability of two new quality-assured datasets which are “meshable” with other global Linked Data sources. In addition, the documents made available will be accessible to all the usual web search and indexing services such as Google, contributing to their searchability and findability, and thereby raising the profile of these Mimas JISC services to research users. In common parlance, the resources will have more “Google juice”.

Prototype Data Visualisations

We also suggest a number of end user prototype ideas. These would provide attractive and compelling data visualisations based around a number of visualisation concepts. We intend to produce one prototype. We intend to use the ideas suggested as the basis for this, but given the iterative nature of the project, it may end up being something quite different. We will produce additional prototypes if time and resources allow.

The project intends to hold a small developer competition to gather further end use cases and prototype ideas run by the UKOLN DevCSI team on behalf of the project.

Opportunities and Barriers Reporting

We will log ongoing projects issues as they arise to inform our opportunities and barriers reporting that we will deliver via posts on the LOCAH project blog. We will outline and discuss the methods and solutions we have adopted to overcome, mediate or mitigate against these, wherever this has been possible.

The methods and solutions we establish will iteratively feed into the ongoing development process. This will mean that we are able to work out solutions to issues as they arise, and implement them in the next phase of rapid development.

We are keen to engage with the other projects funded as part of the jiscExpo call, and any additional UK HE projects working at implementing Linked Data solutions. The project team has very strong links with the Linked Data community: we will look to engage the community by stimulating debate about implementation problems via the project blog. We will also set up a project Twitter feed to generate discussion on the project #locah tag. In addition, we will engage via relevant JISCmail lists as well as the UK Government Data Developers and the Linked Data API Google discussion groups that several members of the team are already part of.